To say Avery County, North Carolina is an interesting place would be an understatement. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains and boasting the highest elevation of any county east of the Mississippi, its unique geography is paired with an equally odd mix of residents and developments. Elements of old Appalachia – rural poverty, vast swathes of the county lacking cell phone service, and weekly bluegrass pickings at country stores – coexist along glaring symbols of gentrification like ski slopes, upscale clothing boutiques, multimillion dollar homes and ubiquitous hordes of elderly Floridians. Add in a thriving industry of tourist traps like gem “mines,” garish displays of both natural and unnatural fall foliage and festivals venerating woolly worms, and you’ve got a truly bizarre mix, but one cannot help but notice the ever-present tensions between old and new development. One of my favorite chroniclers of the region, author Ron Rash is perhaps the best at capturing the tensions between old and new Appalachia in short stories about down-on-their-luck meth addicts and rural folk. Massive new subdivisions always seem to be lurking on the edges of his grim vignettes; just as mansions and condos popping up on surrounding ridges jarringly disrupts the natural beauty of this area. It’s a county that also happens to be, as of August, my new home, and we found ourselves on the knife’s edge of this conflict while being aggressively tailgated while attempting to navigate treacherous mountain roads in a car with Florida plates.

Coincidentally enough, this rural mountain county of 18,000 is also the subject of a new concept album of sorts from Barton Carroll, a songwriter who grew up in Avery County before moving out west to Seattle. With his distance from North Carolina, its safe to say Carroll’s nostalgia tinted view of Avery County life falls into the traditional side of this area’s divide between history and change. In an interview (an album stream is linked here as well), Carroll described the record as “reflections of an upbringing in the Appalachian Mountains seen through the lens of several years of city life on the West Coast” and its full of folk-tinged songs about lost loves and mountain memories, in the best storytelling tradition. My favorite off the record is probably “Beech Mountain Waltz,” a doomed love story about a World War 1 where a soldier goes to war while his lover dies of the Spanish Flu.

And thankfully, for the purposes of this site, he also includes a train song, “It Had to Be a Train,” yet another sad train song about a departing lover, this time leaving from Boone. There is a clever hint of self-awareness about the somewhat cliched plot of the song – the narrator mocks her choice of transportation “don’t you know the train’s outdated these days.” And indeed, a picky railroad historian would note that the last major railroad operating in the county, the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina, or “Tweetsie Railroad” was washed out in a 1957 flood. But it’s definitely an effective train song that fits well on a record built around fuzzy and somewhat distorted remembrances of the past.

Incidentally, the album just came out Tuesday (October 15) – so check it out on Skybucket Records. I’ve been playing it a lot lately, and not just because its about Avery County!